It's not just fish vs. people

The San Francisco Chronicle weighs in on the Bush administration's role in characterizing the Endangered Species Act as the culprit in the Klamath Basin water crisis.

Interior Secretary Gale Norton does the public a disservice by advancing the simplistic notion that the Endangered Species Act caused the pain of water-short farmers by putting the interests of fish before those of humans. The Cabinet member who has a key role enforcing the 1973 law should show a better grasp of the importance to everyone on Earth of preserving wildlife and biological diversity.

Norton, of course, was functioning on TV at a crass political level as she echoed Klamath River Basin farmers, whose irrigation water was cut off because of drought and the need to save endangered sucker fish and salmon. She also was promoting the administration's bid to revise the Endangered Species Act, particularly by keeping environmentalists from suing the federal government to force listings of imperiled species and to require habitat protection.

The Endangered Species Act surely could use updating, but it is not the culprit in the Klamath Basin. Damming and agricultural pollution have wiped out thousands of jobs for fisheries workers, besides devastating wildlife. And economies for thousands of miles north and south of the basin are dependent on the waterfowl that stop at the Klamath refuge.